williamtrask

Then in the spirit of democratic values, I oppose the world you think we should (or do) live in. I hope a sufficient number of others will as well. I think we can and should aspire for more.

I’m not sure the latter two are actually counterexamples. The internet has some pretty dark places and e2e encrypted messaging isn’t visible enough for us to really know what goes on in there.

Forgive me, but you sound like someone who has never needed help from another person, or the help you received you felt you deserved.

I think you should remember that all of our lives affect each other. We have a social responsibility to pursue a society where those effects lead to happy, healthy people.

If you think you’d rather live in a survival of the fittest jungle there are plenty of countries you can move to. In the west, we consider the progress away from such things as one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments.

It’s worth remembering that the “traditional life” is more or less what’s left after every previous society experimented until it fell. We are experimenting now too, and will probably fall. Some of the experiments will work but also a mean reversion will likely occur.

Such is progress when you zoom out to the century scale.

Tell me how blockchain makes anything Sybil-resistant and I’ll bite.

I can create as many Bitcoin/eth/etc wallets as I want.

LinkedIn knows. LinkedIn + Glassdoor really knows.

Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_for_Nutriti...

It’s time for the US mail service to digitise and fulfill its constitutional obligation to provide a private, secure mail service for all American citizens.

Of the articles I’ve read about Peter, this is I think the best description of his achievements wrt Let’s Encrypt. An illuminating read about an inspired life.

RIP Peter.

I’ll take that over advertising any day of the week. This isn’t remotely as misleading or damaging as half the ads I see on Facebook or Instagram every day.

This is the Peter I knew too.

+1

If the ads didn’t change what you showed based on the price and instead charged a fixed price ti be in the list (and still be ranked by what’s best) then I think you can call it ethical.

That is to say, helping people find the best product is ethical. Helping them find whichever product has the biggest marketing budget less so.

If the marketing book said that it would be poorly marketing itself. There’s plenty of “bend the truth” culture in marketing.

I’d encourage you to keep using the word startup. The world is better off if the term and the culture it imbues doesn’t become too narrow.

There should be a fourth option, “Fund it”

Might I suggest elaborating on the incoherence. This reads as a summary of points and then simply exclaiming “incoherent!”.

To summarise alternatively, if you can’t get it in this life, don’t pretend you can, and instead find hope in the next. Given how little we know about consciousness and what happens to it, it’s not technically incoherent. Possibly not provable but not incoherent either.

As someone also in the U.K., check your CO2 levels where you sleep and work.

Also high CO2 in working and sleeping areas. Basically any older building without HVAC and with upgraded (double pane) windows.

I think there are maybe other reasons to believe a retirement home may be less fun than a dorm.

Believe it or not the wheelbarrow was considered modern technology at one point.

Software is fixed cost to create and near-free to distribute. Sure there are tiny cloud costs for running things and maybe you need a couple engineers to fix bugs, but the subscription pricing model doesn’t fit this.

I agree with you, but no society functions at the “0” end of that spectrum. That’s anarchy. Even Mad Max / Book of Eli level dystopia still had nonzero trust in local warlords as institutions.

A “zero-trust society” seems like a dangerous phrase to advocate. Society exists because of trust in institutions.

The interesting juxtaposition is that the author didn’t just drink inferior coffee in the course of meaningful life moments, the moments were so much more meaningful that the author has begun to prefer the inferior product. It’s not reinforcement per day, it’s a change in values altogether

To everyone replying with their coffee preferences, you may be missing the point. This post isn’t about coffee, it’s about people and experiences in life being more important than products. It’s about a product’s quality being defined not by its substance but by its reminder of things that can’t be purchased. It’s one of the most beautiful posts I’ve seen in a long time. Hope you look beyond the coffee.

Edit: Hope I didn't come across as too harsh to folks replying with their favourite coffee styles. I think I find myself in a near-constant state of, "but what about the things that matter" when spending time in VC/Startup/SV/AI/crypto/etc. culture. I know more unhappy-but-wildly-successful people here than I can shake a stick at, and I think we (as a community) are hugely complicit in pushing a consumerist culture where stuff>people. I was deeply moved to see a piece surface to HN which poetically argued for the opposite value set, and I had a moment of frustration when it wasn't clear that it was coming across to people in the comments. :)

Assumption: determinism

Counterexample: quantum mechanics

Surely the main reason iPad and Air don’t become the same product is to push more and more consumers into the increasingly locked down product. Opening up iPad to run arbitrary code would ruin this anti-competitive advantage

Society sounds very cranky

I have. Works great. Impressive dashboard. It parses your gmail among other things looking for services. It’s basically a big delete button.

They even have a team Of real people that will get on the phone and stuff if a company doesn’t comply.